In the afternoon I met Sereda, the Commissar of
Agriculture. He insisted that the agrarian policy had been
much misrepresented by their enemies for the purposes of
agitation. They had no intention of any such idiocy as the
attempt to force the peasants to give up private ownership.
The establishment of communes was not to be compulsory
in any way; it was to be an illustrative means of propaganda
of the idea of communal work, not more. The main task
before them was to raise the standard of Russian agriculture,
which under the old system was extremely low. By working
many of the old estates on a communal system with the best
possible methods they hoped to do two things at once: to
teach the peasant to realize the advantages of communal
labour, and to show him that he could himself get a
very great deal more out of his land than he does. "In
other ways also we are doing everything we can to give
direct help to the small agriculturists. We have mobilized all
the agricultural experts in the country. We are issuing a
mass of simply written pamphlets explaining better methods
of farming."
(I have seen scores of these pamphlets on forestry, potatoes,
turf, rotation of crops, and so on, besides the agricultural
journals issued by the Commissariat and sent in large
quantities to the villages.)
I told Sereda I had heard that the peasants were refusing to
sow more than they wanted for their own needs. He said
that on the contrary the latest reports gave them the right to
hope for a greater sown area this year than ever before, and
that even more would have been sown if Denmark had not
been prevented from letting them have the seed for which
they had actually paid. I put the same question to him that I
put to Nogin as to what they most needed; he replied,
"Tractors."